Facebook chef Josef Desimone killed in motorcycle accident

Facebook staffers and executives were mourning the death of longtime corporate chef Josef Desimone, a popular figure on the company's Menlo Park campus who died after being involved in a motorcycle accident Monday morning.

"Josef was a Facebook legend and institution," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his own Facebook page. Zuckerberg said Desimone joined the company in 2008 "and built our culinary team from a handful of employees in a single cafe into a global team with dozens of world class restaurants" inside Facebook's various offices around the world.

"Josef played an incredibly important role in defining our culture during those first years and right up to the present," Zuckerberg added.

Details about the motorcycle accident weren't immediately available. But more than 200 Facebook employees and other friends had added their own condolences to Zuckerberg's post Monday evening. Many of them recalled personal encounters with the chef or his cooking, describing him as energetic and passionate about food and as someone who liked to chat and offer encouragement to Facebook employees.

"Wherever Josef was, everything was not only delicious but filled with joy and a love of life," Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, said in a Facebook post. Sandberg said she first met Desimone when he cooked at Google, where she worked before moving to Facebook.

Desimone attended culinary school in Charleston, S.C., and worked at several restaurants, including the Cafe de la Presse at the Trident Hotel in San Francisco, where he was executive chef before joining Google, according to a 2008 interview in the magazine Fast Company.

While working at Facebook, the 44-year-old Desimone was an active volunteer with nonprofit groups, including Meals on Wheels, the music education program Little Kids Rock and others, according to a Facebook representative. "Almost every weekend, he was volunteering with veterans organizations, hosting firefighter breakfasts or supporting some other valuable cause," Zuckerberg wrote.